'Reel' Indians

PETER: This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh. We’re talking today about some of the ways American Indians have been depicted over the course of American history. So far, we’ve covered representations that you can see. But what about images of Indians that come from what we hear? One of our producers, Kelly Jones, spoke with an anthropologist who has studied speech patterns of Indians in popular culture. And Kelly brought back this report.

KELLY JONES: If I asked you to play Indian, what’s the first thing you would do? That’s what anthropology professor, Barbra Meek, asks her undergrads at the beginning of the semester. Their responses might sound familiar.

BARBRA MEEK: You know, you get the obvious responses of the, how, white man, and the raising of your hand, and the dropping of your voice.

KELLY JONES: Meek’s students are reenacting what they’ve seen and heard in movies and on TV. And Meek is super curious about what they hear when pop culture Indians speak.

BARBRA MEEK: One of my overall interests in all of this is trying to understand the kind of social work that language does, especially when we’re not paying attention to it. And so part of my work is figuring out what exactly is it that marks that speech as Indian-like.

KELLY JONES: Meek calls Indian-like speech Hollywood Injun English. It has different grammatical roles and features, but no basis in any actual Native American practice or speech pattern. It’s totally made up. Other pop culture stereotypes index different images.

BARBRA MEEK: Hollywood has never been shy about portraying Greeks as crazy or Mexicans as lazy, but the image that’s crafted by Hollywood Injun English is the image of the disappearing Indian. Here’s how it works. Rule number one, it has to sound foreign. We hear that in the how greeting, like this one from the chief in Disney’s 1953 Peter Pan.

PETER PAN INDIAN CHIEF: How.

DISNEY CHARACTERS: How, Chief. How.

BARBRA MEEK: OK, so the immediate interpretation is that this is someone who is from somewhere else.

KELLY JONES: Along with the how, Hollywood Injuns also invent words, ditch verb tenses, and say me instead of I to refer to themselves, all in order to sound more foreign, like in this Bugs Bunny episode from 1960.

BUGS BUNNY INDIAN: Boss, Boss. Where um you go, Boss? Oh, boy. Me wouldn’t like to be me tonight.

BARBRA MEEK: So in that case, you hear the use of um, which is really pervasive across linguistic performances. And it’s not really derived from any actual linguistic practice in real life.

KELLY JONES: Rule number two is, Hollywood Injun English has to be slow and plotting in comparison to the more fluent speech of the other characters. Take this clip from a 1988 episode of MacGyver.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

-Hello, my name is Standing Wolf. Bitter Flats is a place of power. If wires go up, they will harm the spirits of the mountain.

-Look, Standing Wolf, I respectful your beliefs.

[END AUDIO PLAYBACK]

BARBRA MEEK: In contrast to the other characters who are speaking quickly and more fluently, and the American characters are portrayed as having more difficulty in expressing themselves.

KELLY JONES: Rule number three, Hollywood Injun English must be sprinkled with references to nature. Here’s an Indian in an episode of Quantum Leap from 1990.

QUANTUM LEAP INDIAN: My brother, the hawk, all it’s life, it flies where it wants.

KELLY JONES: Or again, the chief from Peter Pan.

PETER PAN INDIAN CHIEF: For man moons, red man fight pale face Lost Boys. Sometime you win.

BARBRA MEEK: So another one here is the, for many moons, right. Because American Indians characters, or at least in the imagination, right, counts time using the celestial bodies, rather than clocks, or watches, or something. And again, it positions the American Indian character in a less civilized, more primitive slot.

KELLY JONES: And finally, rule number four. The truest Hollywood Injun is a stoic one, who is all but silent. Either a narrator or other character can speak for them, as is the case in many John Wayne movies. Or they can mutter monosyllabic like Shep Proudfoot in Fargo, which came out in 1996.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

-So do you remember getting a call Wednesday night?

-Nope.

-You do reside there at 1415 Fremont Terrace?

-Yup.

-Anyone else residing there?

-No.

-Well, Mr. Proudfoot, this call came in past three in the morning.

KELLY JONES: Lest you think that Hollywood Injun English is part of a vanishing era, here’s a clip from Parks and Rec, a show that’s still on the air at the time of this broadcast. In this scene, the character, Ken Hotate, a tribal elder of the Wamapoke Indians, is performing a ritual to lift a fake Indian curse from the town, a curse that he faked threatened to put there.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

-[INDIAN CHANTING]

[END AUDIO PLAYBACK]

BARBRA MEEK: At this point, we get subtitles that read, I am not saying anything. No one can understand me anyway.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

-Hooka. Mana hey. Doobie, doobie, doo.

[END AUDIO PLAYBACK]

BARBRA MEEK: In case you didn’t catch that, it was a slow and low doobie, doobie, doo.

KELLY JONES: OK so this isn’t Hollywood Injun English. It’s to Hollywood Injun gibberish. We can laugh along with Ken as he pulls one over on the citizens of Pawnee. But I think that Ken Hotate is an Indian character that proves the rule, real Indian practice remains hidden behind an imaginary style of speaking that has nothing to do with actual Native American languages. Because when he’s not trying to fake a real Indian language, you can hear the low and disfluent Hollywood Injun influence in that character’s English.

KEN HOTATE: There are two things I know about white people. They love Matchbox 20. And they are terrified of curses.

KELLY JONES: You’d think we would have come a long way from the how of the Indian chief in Peter Pan in 1953. But Hollywood Injun English is not a vanishing practice.

BRIAN: That’s Kelly Jones, one of our producers. We also heard from Barbra Meek, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan.